A Lapse in Judgment
by Jude Mustard
Summary: What would it take to drive a man to suicide? Set in Female Trouble.


**A LAPSE IN JUDGMENT **

There are two people a girl must give thanks to:   
her Alpha & Omega, and her Beta & Amiga (no, I don't mean the computer ;)

Disclaimer: No infringement intended, blah, blah…you know the rest. 

Spoilers: up to _Female Trouble _

* * *

_He backed up slowly and then rolled his chair forward deliberately, ramming his knees into the edge of the table. _

_Nope. Didn't feel a thing. _

  
***** 

After she left, I sat there. Sat and thought. Not much else I've been doing these days. 

I thought about her. 

She intrigued me from the day I met her. She was so powerful, yet so vulnerable. So strong and yet so easily hurt. A woman, a child, something in between… 

I remember the day she first broke into my apartment and I found out who and what she was. I thought I wanted to use her abilities in my cause, but I realized that my talents and resources could be of use to her as well. I didn't acknowledge it at the time, but the mysterious girl/cat/woman's vulnerability made me want to be her knight in shining armour. I wanted to rescue her from everything she feared and was running from. 

It was my male ego, I guess. Me Tarzan, you Jane. Me beat up bad guys and you cook me dinner. Fundamental law of the universe. 

Yeah, right. 

The first couple of months after I was shot were unreal. It felt like I was playing a game of pretend. It was interesting, and almost exciting—having to learn how to do the same old things in new and different ways. Everything from going to the grocery store to going to the bathroom was a logistical nightmare. Most of the time, it was frustrating, but sometimes it felt like an adventure. 

I tried to rebuild my life into a semblance of normalcy. I learnt to drive with hand controls. I played wheelchair basketball. I exposed corruption and brought the guilty to justice. The only person I allowed to see my weakness was a man whose paycheck I wrote. 

I was in control. 

It never really sank in that my paralysis was going to be permanent. I did weights. I did calisthenics. I did every exercise in the book, because I always held on to the belief that someday I would heal; I would get back the feeling below my waist and my legs would work again. 

There were some days I woke up, thinking, "Look out, world, here I come!" But more and more often there were days when I wondered what I had to offer that world. Whether I was actually as useless as I felt. Those were the days I plunged myself deeper than ever into my work. It gave me purpose; accounted for my continued existence in the universe. I was fighting for a good cause. Truth, justice, blah, blah, woof, woof. 

Don't we all do that? I was a workaholic, even before. Valerie once told me that we're the same. Workaholic, alcoholic…we're both addicted to something outside of use to fill us and make us whole. "More of me, and I will patch up the gaping hole inside of you," its siren song rings sweetly. Before long, I became its slave. 

I made sure I went to bed every night so physically and mentally exhausted that I never lay awake thinking about how lonely and isolated I really was. 

And then _she_ came. 

  
*****

"I need you to do some legwork for me." 

The words came out more easily than I'd thought they would. I'd been fidgeting for weeks, knowing that there was something out there to be done and being powerless to do it. And here I was, reduced to asking this tiny woman for help. 

I had to keep constantly reminding myself that she wasn't human. 

"You want to get the rest of your ass shot off, be my guest, but I kind of like being able to walk," she responded when I challenged her to get involved in my mission. 

She could harden her voice, but not her eyes. 

In those eyes I saw a flash of fear, and a tinge of something else. Fear of getting out of her comfort zone and getting involved. And… guilt. Guilt, because on some level she blamed herself for my needing someone else to do my legwork for me in the first place. 

She sounded like she was trying her best to convince herself that she didn't give a damn about Logan Cale, Eyes Only, or the rest of the world. 

I smiled to myself. Maybe I couldn't challenge her yet, but I wasn't above tempting her. I reached into my desk and pulled out the folder on the Manticore escapee. 

I'd intended to use the information to bait her, to keep her from walking out the door. I didn't anticipate her reaction. 

"Zack!" she whispered as she reached out and took the photograph, caressing it in her hands. When she looked up again it was the lost and lonely nineteen-year-old who looked out at me through those brimming eyes. 

Underneath all the fake cynicism, the chimera's heart is more human than any other. 

  
***** 

Zack had been their leader, I learned. He was always teaching them, guiding them and looking out for them. He had been like a big brother to Max. 

She'd looked up to him. She missed him and feared for him. 

I wasn't altogether surprised to find myself feeling a new emotion. 

  
***** 

"There's no reason for you to get jealous," she teased. 

She was talking about Eric, the kid who fancied himself her boyfriend. 

Jealous? 

Duh! 

But jealousy presupposes a certain level of intimacy which I wasn't ready to permit. 

"Of course there isn't—you and I don't have that kind of relationship." 

Was I imagining it, or did her face fall when I said that? It seemed as though she was flirting with me. 

"Have you ever been up on the Space Needle?" she tried again. 

The most romantic place in Seattle? Up there, almost above the perennial rain clouds, away from the noise and the bustle of the rest of the city, I'd proposed to Valerie. In spite of the painful memories attached to that place, I still loved it. 

I could tell that the Space Needle was a special place to her. I guessed she felt indebted to me for my help with Hannah and wanted to repay me, impulsively profferring one of her secrets. 

I wouldn't take that from her. 

Besides, the elevators in that place have been shut down since the Pulse, and I'd be damned if I'd let her carry me up there. 

"No, and it's not on my list of things to do," I smiled at her. 

"How come?" 

"Actually, I've always been terrified of heights." 

She took my word for it, remarked that she would have to change that, and left. I looked at my reflection in the window as I watched the tiny city lights below. 

Yeah, right, Logan. You're afraid of heights. That's why you live in a penthouse suite. 

  
***** 

I asked her over for dinner. I'd done the wining and dining thing all the time with Daphne and Val. Women seem to have something for men who can cook. But cooking for Max was different. I wasn't really trying to woo her. 

I wanted to make up for the first time I'd invited her to stay for dinner. I'd done _that_ in order to trick her, keeping up the seduction just long enough for me to discover the barcode on her neck and expose her secret. 

This time I wanted to wine and dine her for real. 

In the end we'd missed dinner because she'd fallen ill. Her seizures had become worse than usual and she'd curled up on my sofa and dosed herself with an alarming number of pills containing tryptophan, which helps her get over them. 

It was probably the first time she'd ever allowed anyone to see her in that state. 

I found out later that she'd stolen money from her roommate to buy the pills, and then stolen a car to sell and make the money back. When her friends had assumed she was a junkie and flushed her pills, she'd broken into a hospital pharmacy to steal more. 

The whole time, she'd never asked for my help, even when I asked her what I could do to help. The only thing she'd wanted from me was to stay with her while she was going through the worst of it, begging me not to leave. 

She was something special. 

  
***** 

The first time she came over to my place without my asking her to was after Valerie had walked out of my life a second time. 

When my ex-wife had turned up out of the blue, I'd fooled myself into thinking it was for no other reason than to try and patch things up between us. There was a little voice inside me that told me no one is that unselfish. I chose to ignore it. 

It was Max who'd taken on the unpleasant task of taking the facts and slapping me in the face with them. Val hadn't come because she still loved me, because she missed me, because in spite of everything that had happened between us she was still a woman and I was still a man. 

She was a woman who needed money, and I was the guy who had it. Plain and simple. 

I was a fool. 

The lights of the city blurred as I stared out of the window through the driving rain. Bling had left and I was alone. I wondered whether there was any point to anything I was doing. In the end, it all just comes down to the numbers. 

I don't know how Max knew, but her company was exactly what I needed just then. She came over, looking neither for money nor help, only company. When I was with her, I dared to hope that there were still good people left in this crazy, messed up world. 

  
***** 

She had come over rather often after that. I don't think we ever did anything very special—just hung out, ate, talked, did nothing in particular. 

She'd just left after whipping my ass at chess the night that I discovered that I had a bullet fragment in my spine that would either make me quadriplegic or kill me, if I didn't undergo an operation to have it removed. 

The operation would probably kill me anyway. But it was a chance I had to take. 

She didn't know anything about it. Before I had the chance to tell her, something came up. Manticore had put a price on her head and she had to leave. Leave, with Zack, who had come to help her escape to safety. 

By then I couldn't tell her. She might have insisted on delaying her flight until I was better. I had put her in harm's way too many times already. 

I didn't know if she'd ever come back, and I didn't know if I'd wake up after the surgery the next day. 

So I said goodbye, looking at her and memorizing every feature. I said goodbye to her lips, her hair, her eyes. Especially her eyes. I looked into them for a long time, then tore myself away. They would haunt me. 

On a sudden impulse, she asked me to go with her. 

Everything in me wanted to say yes. Even knowing that I'd slow her escape down considerably, I actually considered fleeing with her. 

But Eyes Only still had a job to do. 

I couldn't leave that behind. Not even for her. 

  
***** 

She got out of the car and started walking away. 

Until then, it had been I who put up the lines and markers that defined our relationship. She threw her heart and soul into everything she did, but in this she'd let me set the pace, up until that moment. 

She turned around and walked back, bent down, and kissed me. It was a first kiss. It was a last kiss. It was everything in between. She gave all, and she took all. It was a moment that contained a lifetime's worth of what-ifs and could-have-beens. It was the beginning and it was the end of everything. 

And then she was gone. 

  
***** 

She had come back. She'd sensed that I was in trouble and she'd come back. 

I wouldn't be here today if she hadn't. 

When we realized that I was going to live and she was going to stay, we rewound the kiss like it had never happened, and played back that part of our relationship at a more reasonable speed. I started by inviting her to be my date at Bennett's wedding. 

I wanted to have someone there I could call a friend. And I wanted to show off this woman of unearthly beauty and inhuman intelligence to my family. Logan Cale is no loser, dudes. Look at the kind of woman who is willing to hang on his arm—or sit on his armrest. 

It was the most fun I'd had in a long time. The immense awkwardness of meeting most of my extended family and old friends for the first time since the shooting was tempered by the enjoyment of having her there with me. 

I heard the incredulous whispering behind my back. Everyone was jealous of the "black sheep of the family". 

There were inevitably a few references to a "sugar daddy" but I just smiled to myself as I watched her blend effortlessly into a room full of snooty rich people. There were sugar daddies here all right, but I wasn't one of them. 

I was glad she'd stolen the six-thousand-dollar dress. She was absolutely radiant in it. 

That was also the night I realized that a miracle had happened. 

  
***** 

_He wheeled the chair back and drove his legs into the table again, harder than before._

_Still nothing. _

  
***** 

I didn't believe it at first when I hit my leg against the coffee table. So I tried it again. It _hurt_! 

I knew it was the blood transfusion from Max that had helped my spinal cord to do the impossible, to regenerate itself. Every day I could feel and move a little more. 

Just when I was learning to rebuild my life around my loss, I found that I hadn't lost anything. I'd never given up hope that I'd get out of that chair someday, and she'd been the one who had proven that I hadn't hoped in vain. 

Secure in my arms, she'd looked up at me with awe and wonder in her eyes. 

"It's like a miracle," she whispered. 

"You're the miracle, Max. You did this." 

"I'd forgotten how tall you were." 

She'd never looked at me like that before. No one had, not for a long time. 

She'd said all the time that the wheelchair didn't matter to her. That it didn't make any difference. 

But she'd never looked at me like that before. 

  
***** 

My heart was so full I couldn't contain it. My table was groaning with abundance. My cup overflowed. 

For months the wheelchair had been a firewall that had kept me trapped behind a computer console. Half a man, living half a life, doing half a job. 

She'd given me back my life. 

For the first time since the shooting, I dared to hope again. I dared to dream of a better world. I dared to believe that light triumphed over darkness, and the good guys would win in the end. 

Hope lasted all of two weeks. 

  
***** 

My immune system started attacking the foreign nerve cells in my spinal cord, and I began to lose everything all over again, only this time it was slow and painful. 

I held on to the pain, welcoming every spasm. It meant that I could still feel. Each cramp meant that the muscles would still move. 

But too soon the pain slipped through my clenched fists and was gone, replaced by the inevitable numbness. 

Again. 

  
***** 

It should have been easier to get used to the chair the second time around. 

After all, there was nothing new to be learnt. 

  
***** 

_He opened the drawer and took out a gun._

_He stared at it for a long time, a haggard, defeated face staring back at him from the burnished steel._

  
***** 

Nothing new to be learnt, except that good doesn't really triumph over evil, and nice guys always finish last. 

My eyes noticed something in the open drawer. I put the gun down and picked up a small packet. It was a round metallic object, folded in a piece of paper. 

I unwrapped it to find a silver locket on a chain. It had been my mother's. She had been a warrior, fighting bravely till the very end. She'd managed to smile through the pain. 

_Though the fig tree does not blossom, and there be no fruit on the vines…_ she'd said _…yet I will hope…_

I put the locket safely back in the drawer, letting the chain slip slowly out of my hands. I had always admired my mother's faith. But I'd never shared it. 

Picking the gun up again, I turned over the piece of paper in my hand. It was the note that Nathan Herrero had attached to the disk he'd sent me with the evidence condemning Allan Lans as a murderer. 

_The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil…_ he'd written, knowing that I would know the rest of it. Both of our lives as investigative journalists had been based on that belief. 

I remembered doing the Eyes Only cable hack the night that he'd been killed, broadcasting the information he'd sent me that would put at least one more corrupt official out of business. I'd watched it over again later, wondering if I should have retaped it before broadcasting it. 

The Eyes were blinking away tears as the usual words were spoken. _"__This cable hack cannot be traced. It cannot be stopped. And it is the only free voice left in this city."_ There seemed to be an extra emphasis on the word _"only"_. 

So much for the impartial reporter. 

_The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil…_

"…is for idiots like me to shoot themselves in the head." I whispered to myself. 

I looked longingly at the gun. 

It had been a lapse in judgment. A moment of selfishness. 

It would not happen again. 

  
***** 

_He sighed, putting the gun and the scrap of paper back in the drawer with trembling hands. He closed the drawer and pushed his chair back from the table, his jaw set grimly._

_He had work to do._

* * *

**Author's Note: **

This story came out of a little prodding from my beta when she asked me something along these lines: What would drive the "last free voice left in this city" to such despair that it would want to silence itself? And what would stop it from doing that? 

I wanted to find an intrinsic reason for Logan to not kill himself, rather than an external diversion. I maintain that if you live in a _penthouse_ suite, you can't have an _upstairs_ neighbour with a moisture situation. grumble Hence the AU bit at the end.   


***** 

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."   
–Edmund Burke. 

"Though the fig tree should not blossom   
And there be no fruit on the vines,   
Though the yield of the olive should fail   
And the fields produce no food,   
Though the flock should be cut off from the fold   
And there be no cattle in the stalls,   
Yet I will exult in the LORD,   
I will rejoice in the God of my salvation."   
–Habakkuk 3:17-18 


End file.
